Certain vehicles (e.g., powered vehicles or vehicle consists) include communication systems that periodically obtain measurements related to the health, operations, or control of the vehicle. For example, locomotives in a rail vehicle consist (“consist” referring to a group of vehicles linked to travel together along a route, including possible coordinated control over one or more wired and/or wireless connections) may include communication systems that periodically receive measurements related to operations of the locomotive, such as speed, horsepower, temperature, brake pressure measurements, and the like. These measurements represent data parameters of the vehicle, and the values of the data parameters may periodically change. For example, measurements of speed of a traction motor may be a first data parameter, measurements of brake pressures may be a second data parameter, and so on.
The data parameters may be measured or obtained by one or more sensors or components of the vehicle. The values of the data parameters are requested and used by computerized services or applications running on the vehicle and/or running off-board the vehicle. These services or applications perform various functions based on the data parameters. For example, the services or applications may control tractive operations and/or braking operations of the vehicle, monitor performance of the vehicle over time, record events of the vehicle, and the like.
Many data parameters may be obtained for a locomotive or other powered system. In some known systems, the data parameters are sent from the sensors or other components directly to the services or applications that use the data parameters. The same data parameters may be sent multiple times to different services or applications. The increased frequency at which the data parameters are sent increases the number of times that the data parameters are read and written (e.g., obtained from memory and saved to memory). The reading and writing of relatively large amounts of data parameters for relatively large numbers of services or applications can consume large portions of available computer processing and memory resources of the vehicle. As the amount of available processing and/or memory resources decreases, the latency involved in handling requests for data parameters and publishing the values of the data parameters back to the requesting services or applications can significantly increase and delay the functions provided by the services or applications.